How Long Left for Copper

With the increasing use of fibre in the network & the fact that much of BT's copper final mile is life expired and in poor condition how much longer is there for copper to remian in the Network.

The curent BT solution of overlaying the copper network with fibre is a pretty expensive solution as they have to maintain both a fibre network & a copper one plus it uses up more duct space. Copper is also pretty expensive it also means they have about twice as much capital tied up in underground line plant.

Logically they ought to be looking to only having a fibre network particularly when much of their copperline plant is very old

Until Fibre becomes mainstream and widely deployed.

I believe places which are enabled for FTTP still use the Copper Local Loop for phone calls at the moment.

Copper is usually seen as 'old' and 'degraded' in terms of Broadband speeds, but if you think of it in the telephony world, it still does its job well.

Copper will probably exist for at least another 20 years before it is nationally replaced with Fibre.

There was a recent post on here stating that more recent FTTP installs have had no associated copper pair.

the fact that much of BT's copper final mile is life expired and in poor condition

I'm not sure how or what you base that statement on ? Speculation would be my guess. How many on this forum alone, have we seen, where the 'life expired and in poor condition' pair to their house is now providing much higher speed services via FTTC.

Clearly a full FTTP roll out would be glorious, and fairly future proof, but no company has the finances to roll this out, and even if it did, I suspect it's shareholders would be concerned that they would be told to share it's new resource for a fraction of it's install costs, thus making any prospective profits even further away.

The only chance of a fibre to the premises based, full roll out, would be if the Government 'owned' and funded it, then re-couped the costs by charging CP's to provided service to punters over it. This will clearly never happen as it involves both 'common sense' and 'Government' in the same idea.

Maybe until every user in the country is prepared to contribute £200 or more towards the cost of running fibre to their premises.

The cost will be enormous and without it being recouped from the users there is no way it is affordable. Fibre to the cabinets - easy but from cabinets to pole, pole to pole and pole to premises is a labour intensive job.

Copper is their to provide voice services, it still works fine.

There's no reason to pull out copper for voice and replace it with fibre for voice. If people want fibre to broadband that's something else entirely and the customer should rightly foot the bill.

If its cheaper to provide just fibre for new builds fine, but there's no reason to start replacing copper, as I say its for voice.

And I'd also like to know where this "must of, expired/poor condition" comes from, says who?

If we were starting again sure, we'd use fibre, but we aren't. If people want FTTP for broadband that has nothing at all to do with copper and should be paid for.

I doubt copper will ever be completely removed. After all VM are going to be testing 1.5Gbps over copper coax cable and FTTC will support a few 100Mbps with line bonding. 10GBASE-T 10Gbps at up-to 100 metres using CAT 6A cable.

AIUI, a major requirement for a telephone service is the provision of access to the emergency telephone number, even in the event of a power cut. Currently that is achieved by means of supplying electrical power over the copper 'phone lines. That becomes more complicated and uncertain if fibre-only connections are installed without parallel copper. Furthermore, the issue is compromised by some VOIP services which offer no information as to the location of a caller. The emergency services ought to have some means of locating a caller who is cut off unexpectedly.

A very large number of people use mobile 'phones nowadays but they don't provide a fallback service if power to the local transmission tower goes down. It would not be practicable or reasonable to require all users of fibre-only connections to install UPSs and to have them compulsorily tested regularly. In addition there is the geolocation issue of using IP addresses, especially if they are dynamic, bearing in mind that every second can count in an emergency.

There is no such thing as a 100% solution but I don't think that a simple and obvious answer has been found yet for these problems, which will compete with powering a telephone over the copper line.

There is this 2008 Ofcom document with a home wiring diagram showing battery backup.

I would expect the current FTTC cabinets to have a 15-20 year life to deliver a return on investment.

I would expect LLU operators with kit in the exchange will be pressuring to keep the eside network copper for a considerable time. I would expect Openreach will be presuring to retire the eside network but that will toast LLU investment.

So I think the copper network will be here for the foreseeable future.

Copper doesn't care how old it is. It cares what it's insulation is. I would reckon on the copper network being in better shape now in terms of insulation and pressurisation than it has ever been simply because of the services it is successfully delivering. .

Edited by deleted (Mon 25-Apr-11 21:51:40)